By Bryan Bender and Farah Stockman
Boston Globe, 11 April 2006
WASHINGTON -- Sunni Arabs are heavily underrepresented among the rank and file of Iraq's new security forces, according to US officials, leaving the US-trained army and police units prone to the same sectarian divisions that have led to sharply increased violence among the general population in recent weeks.
Sunnis make up less than 10 percent of the enlisted forces, just half their share of the country's overall population, and most units lack a mix of Sunnis, Shi'ite Muslims, and Kurds, according to Bush administration officials who cited recent statistics.
As a result, US and NATO trainers frequently are drilling units made up almost exclusively of Shi'ites or Kurds, raising fears that those units could one day turn on the Sunnis or each other in a civil war.
Concerns about fresh waves of sectarian violence grew stronger last week. A bombing at a Shi'ite mosque in Baghdad killed scores of worshippers on Friday, prompting fears that Shi'ite militias would retaliate against Sunnis. An Iraqi military unit composed mostly of Shi'ites was implicated in a retaliatory attack against Sunnis after the bombing of a Shi'ite mosque in Samarra last month.
In recent weeks, the officials say, US soldiers have stepped up their efforts to recruit Sunnis into the 250,000-member security force, hoping to create more diverse units. But the obstacles to creating a multisectarian force -- and the dangers of failing to do so -- were summed up in an analysis by the Congressional Research Service, which was completed earlier this year but not released to the public.
“There is concern that the ethnic-sectarian nature of the burgeoning insurgency is undermining US and Iraqi efforts to create a unified Iraqi security force that can prevent internal insurgent violence from metastasizing into a larger civil war,” declared the analysis, obtained by the Globe last week.
The report added: “With violence unabated in Baghdad and Iraq's three main Sunni provinces, there has been considerable emphasis on recruiting, training, and equipping Iraqi soldiers and policemen, but substantially less attention on the future ethnic/religious makeup of various Iraqi security entities.”
The ethnic makeup of the Iraqi army and police has long been a key factor in the country's struggles with oppression and ethnic strife.
After Iraq's creation at the hands of the British in 1921, its army was primarily led by Sunnis and was never able to effectively integrate Shi'ites and Kurds into its leadership. Thus, Shi'ites made up the lion's share of enlisted personnel, but had little control over their units.
The sense of repression among Shi'ites continued under President Saddam Hussein, who is an ethnic Sunni. Shi'ites make up about 60 percent of the population, Sunnis 20 percent, and Kurds 15 percent; 5 percent are a collection of smaller minority groups.
After US forces overthrew Hussein in 2003, Sunni officers were initially dismissed, but belatedly invited back into leadership positions. Some have not returned, and are believed to be leading the insurgency against the Shi'ite-led government. An estimated 200,000 disaffected Sunni youths are the recruiting pool for the insurgency, John Reid, Britain's defense minister, told the Globe last week during a visit to Washington.
Thus, Reid said, recruiting more Sunnis into the security forces -- which comprise both military units and police -- is crucial to the success of the new Iraqi government. But the US officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the numbers of Sunni soldiers remains a major concern.
“Enlisted Sunnis are slightly less than 10 percent” of total security forces, said a State Department official who was granted anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information. “They should be around 20 percent.”
But he noted that in the officer corps, which includes former leaders in Hussein's army, Sunnis account for more than 20 percent, due to the historical imbalances.
The lack of diversity in the lower ranks is particularly acute in the police forces, which are overseen by the Ministry of Interior, the officials said. Insufficient Sunni police officers to patrol Sunni areas exist, leading to ethnic tension between the police and community.
So far, however, the police and army units have largely resisted the sectarian violence that is unfolding in Iraq, US and Iraqi officials said this week.
But if strife intensifies, security forces could break up along ethnic and sectarian lines, heralding the beginning of a civil war that the US military helped equip.
“The work we are doing with the Ministry of Interior and the police is, effectively, building a Shi'ite army,” said Jeffrey White, a specialist on the Middle East at the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy, referring to lack of Sunnis. “The creation of these ethnically and sectarian-based security forces is a big risk. The only guys who don't have an army are the Sunnis.”
Retired General Anthony Zinni, who was President Bush's Middle East peace envoy, said the recruitment process has never recovered from the initial failure to maintain the Sunni-led army.
“When they started to recruit [for the new Iraqi forces] they ended up with Shias and Kurds,” Zinni said. “The problem with that is that you had Shia and Kurdish kids going into Sunni areas and kicking down doors.”
Indeed, Shi'ite soldiers have taken advantage of their new dominance.
During the December 2005 parliamentary elections, some Shi'ite soldiers carried posters of the Shi'ite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr on their chests or fastened to the ends of their assault rifles. Members of the outlawed Badr Brigade, a Shi'ite militia, are believed to have infiltrated the Wolf Brigade, a government commando unit. The unit allegedly turned on Sunni civilians in retaliation for the bombing of the Shi'ite mosque in Samarra.
“With a shortage of reliable Sunni soldiers to patrol Sunni provinces, the US and Iraqi governments have been forced to deploy mostly Shi'ite units to Sunni towns, which has only exacerbated intercommunal tensions,” according to the recent Congressional Research Service.
For example, the Iraqi Army's Seventh Division, First Brigade, a predominately Shi'ite unit, is stationed outside of Ramadi, a hotbed of Sunni Arab insurgents.
One of the authors of the analysis, Jeremy M. Sharp, a Middle East specialist with the Congressional Research Service, said in an interview that he believes that only large, headquarters-sized units have Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds in the ranks. The smaller operating units that conduct missions -- and are blamed for some of the sectarian violence -- are broken down largely along ethnic lines, he said.
“They might be ethnically mixed at the division level,” he said, “but are they mixed at the company level? They keep that very quiet.”
A former senior intelligence official who recently served in Iraq confirmed that “very few of the units are mixed” and voiced fears that if the Shi'ite-Sunni violence escalates the security forces might become full-fledged participants.
“I watched the Lebanese army break up in the beginning of the 1980s, five or six years into the civil war,” the intelligence official said, speaking under condition of anonymity. “It's hard when your own community is engaged in fighting other communities.”
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Citation: Bryan Bender and Farah Stockman. "Officials grapple with ethnic split in Iraqi forces," Boston Globe, 11 April 2006.
Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/04/11/officials_grapple_with_ethnic_split_in_iraqi_forces/
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